Earlier in the year AT&T tried to put the legal kibosh on Sprint and Clearwire, hoping to prevent them from completing the big merger that would (will) surely make them a WiMAX superpower. The merger is still going through, but AT&T isn't the only company less than thrilled about it.

Illinois' iPCS is a service provider that serves around 640,000 subscribers in portions of Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio and Tennessee with Sprint service, and they have been battling it out with Sprint ever since their acquisition of Nextel back in 2005. With the Nextel issue, iPCS argued that the merger breached the exclusivity portions of their contract with Sprint, and they were successful - court rulings forced Sprint to ditch their Nextel operations in the areas iPCS covers. Now that Clearwire is joining the mix to create a widespread WiMAX network, iPCS is back in the courts again, trying to do the same thing with this merger that they did with the Nextel issue. Timothy M. Yager, president and CEO of iPCS explained their point of view in a news release:

“Over the past few years the exclusivity provisions of our affiliation agreements have been continually tested by Sprint, and we believe that it is appropriate and necessary to continue to defend our rights under the agreements. We firmly believe that the Illinois courts, including the Illinois Appellate Court, that have previously enforced our exclusivity protection will also find that this latest attempt by Sprint to compete with us in our territory is another violation of our agreements.”

Essentially iPCS is arguing that their contract with Sprint promises that iPCS has the exclusive rights to use Sprint's network, and continued mergers with other providers go against this and wreak havoc with their place in the market.

Obviously, Sprint is fighting back. The Clearwire merger is crucial to their goal of creating the first major WiMAX network in the country, and being blocked in 80 markets - however small or large they may be - puts a crimp in their plans. They're heading to the Illinois Circuit Courts to contest iPCS's claims and hope to get things cleared up ASAP as they move forward with their WiMAX plans.

The question now is what will/would happen if iPCS is successful again in their attempts to keep their market exclusively Sprint.